For years, any American kid eying a stable, future-proof job was told to “learn to code.”
Now in 2025, anyone who followed that advice faces a painful reckoning: a decade of booming computer science enrollments has created a massive pile-up of graduates entering an abysmal job market.
A new report by the analyst firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which tracks layoffs across various industries, found that the US tech industry had the highest number of layoffs in October of any sector, with a whopping 33,281 tech workers out of the job.
That’s an awfully high number for one month, and it looks even worse in context — just a month earlier, the number of tech industry layoffs was only 5,639.
Tech companies are planning to lay off 141,159 jobs this year so far, per the report, up from 120,470 over the same period in 2024.
And it likely may not look much better in the near future, either.
“It’s possible with rate cuts and a strong showing in November, companies may make a late-season push for employees,” the report reads, “but at this point, we do not expect a strong seasonal hiring environment in 2025.”
The analysis was spotted by SF Gate, which reported that tech company job cuts in the US are at their highest levels since 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a short-lived recession. For the month of October, however, the analyst report notes that total layoffs haven’t been this high since 2003 — in other words, not even the global financial crisis was this much of a bloodbath.
While it’s easy to blame AI for the tech industry layoffs, CG&C highlights some other factors contributing to the dismal labor news.
“October’s pace of job cutting was much higher than average for the month,” the firm wrote. “Some industries are correcting after the hiring boom of the pandemic, but this comes as AI adoption, softening consumer and corporate spending, and rising costs drive belt-tightening and hiring freezes.”
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